Essay 10: Importance

Essay 10: Importance

If you have a good memory, you may remember how I mentioned at some point that a state-of-things that is incompatible with our needs can be defined as a problem. If you do, you likely also remember how I further built upon this point; when a problem occurs, this incompatibility leads to a deprivation of the affected needs. In essay 1, I mentioned that this deprivation results in urges, which is the fuel that powers the attention needed to solve the problem that has taken center stage. This process is my phenomenological accounting for why it is we act at all and will continue to be a central precondition to a lot of my writing from here on out. One such example of this being a precondition is this essay, where I discuss an implication of this model. If urges can come about due to a shift in our state-of-things to one that is less compatible with our needs, then what determines whether the state-of-things is incompatible? The answer to that question is our beliefs, they are what tie things to our needs. It is not self-evident that finishing a race after everyone else means you are worse at it than them; it is through the belief that ties a faster relative finishing time to significance that one could be devastated with running slower than everyone else. So this can be conceived of as sense data getting filtered through our belief structure to be subjugated into a state-of-things that can then be refiltered through our belief structure to be connected to our needs. With this premise in mind, what would happen if the sense data remains the same, but indications appear that our beliefs are what are unhelpful to some of our needs? This will be the topic of this essay, and I will explore it by first detailing how our belief structure serves as a predictive model for our interacting with the world, before discussing how some beliefs within it are held to be more important to our needs than others, and why the challenging of these important beliefs can lead to urges appearing when nothing has materially changed.

In essay 2, during my discussion on the need for certainty I described how one of the ways we make sense of the world is by turning the world into things, something solid that we know how to interact with. For the sake of convenience at the time I described the process by which we decide what thing we turn the sense data that we call an object into as comparing the attributes of the object in question with those present in our existing set of stories. For example, if we see a soccer ball we’d first identify its attributes, then we’d find the closest match for them in the set of things we have memories of interacting with, and once we’ve matched the set of attributes with “soccer ball” we would have a more distinct image of the soccer ball its own thing, instantiated in the story of the sum of our previous interactions, and this new interaction (even if the scope of the interaction is just seeing it) would be integrated into the story of “soccer ball”. This is a way to conceive of it given the level of vocabulary we utilized at the time, but a “simpler” way to say it is that perception is built on the leveraging of arguments found in our belief structure. The very act of seeing something is comparing the attributes we infer through sense data with the premises of different arguments, and where the attributes best align with the set of premises used in a particular argument we identify the object as the conclusion of that argument (which is a belief). Going back to the soccer ball example we can say “the thing is spherical, has a hexagonal pattern, a leathery texture, bouncy, and roughly the size of a head, therefore it is a soccer ball”. This goes to show that our belief structure can serve as a predictive model that allows us to subjugate chaotic sense data into a thing, but this can be taken one step further. The assertion of a certain thing’s presence is a belief as it is the conclusion of an argument found in our belief structure but remember that that belief can be a premise in a higher-order argument. Say for example the soccer ball we observed is flying in the direction of a player who is situating himself to headbutt the ball into an open goal, and the goal in question is the opposing team’s goal. To a dedicated fan, the sudden tension and awe that comes as a result may very well send them to the hospital. Where did these emotions come from? Why was the subjugation of a soccer ball relatively unemotional but when that realization was used in the identifying of a situation it suddenly became emotional? Quite simply, different beliefs hold differing levels of emotional importance.

Imagine two different beliefs being challenged for me. In the first case, imagine a doctor is telling you that humans actually use every part of the brain, not just 10% of it. You spent your whole life legitimately believing that 90% of our neurons were just not being leveraged by most people because they were not as smart. The realization that every part of our brain has a purpose is likely an intriguing thought and possibly mindblowing but it will likely be an unemotional reaction for most. The reason why is that this belief lacks importance. The importance of a belief is reflective of how severe the implications of its removal would be on the satiation of our needs. A belief can be important for two reasons, either the belief itself is one that we rely on for the satiation of our needs or because beliefs that are derived from higher-order arguments that all rely on said belief as a premise would fall apart and the higher-order beliefs are what are relied on for the satiation of our needs. In the previous example, the belief itself does little to satiate any of our needs in our day-to-day lives and we rarely use it as anything more than a saying anyway so it’s hardly a critical premise in higher-order beliefs. Let’s juxtapose this to a second situation. Imagine here that you wake up in your secure house in your gated community to the sound of gunfire coming from the living room. You walk over realizing your house is damaged, your valuables stolen, and your children killed. The door was seemingly busted open, your security system useless to stop it, and the person at the gate of your neighborhood just allowed the person in because he claimed to be visiting a neighbor. This is an experience that results in trauma, a state of mind that comes from a radical alteration in our belief structure that is so severe that our “stomachs” become torn. A near-permanent rip in our capacity to ever feel the same level of satiation again appears because a belief that was so fundamental to our peace of mind got removed forcibly, and with it the supporting beam that massive swathes of our belief structure relied on for stability and they fell right alongside it. In this case, the belief that got removed is “I am safe”. The murderer broke in despite all the security and the general safety of the community. If he isn’t found there is no reason why he can’t just do it again, and for that matter anyone can do it. If my secure house isn’t safe, then there may be nowhere in the world that is, and I can never just absentmindedly do anything or feel any comfort because the second I do someone can just come up behind me and end my life. Not to mention I put so much of my time into giving my kids the best life I can and now they are gone. What’s the point in ever sacrificing now for the future? What will saving for retirement do for me when I can die tomorrow whenever some guy feels like pulling a trigger? If nowhere is safe then there is no point in saving, no reason to think about the future, no reason to be attached to anyone, and no time to relax or sleep. This is the cascading result of this belief being forcibly removed from its position on your belief structure, and the reason why is because “I am safe” is an extremely important belief, both on its own and by proxy of the higher-order beliefs that rely on it as a premise. As a reminder, the result of the removal of an important belief is the degradation of your ability to fulfill your needs: certainty because there is no assurance I can avoid being killed, uncertainty because I’ll never be able to let the white wolf take rein again, significance because everything I am can be ended by an idiot on a whim, connection because I will never be able to absentmindedly be in the moment with anyone, and homeostasis because I cannot sleep. Every belief has some amount of importance, some have comparatively little (like fun facts) while others are highly important (like “I am safe”). The changing of any belief leads to an alteration in your belief structure and depending on the importance of the belief, the urges that come up (feelings) can differ greatly in intensity. This has massive implications for our process of challenging our own beliefs.

Our mind is a prediction machine. Our mind subjugates the world through a neurological framework called free energy, which in the simplest terms possible means that we assign a label to a thing that provides the best balance between the sensory data we intake and our predictions on what could or should be there. This is what I am referring to when I said earlier that we take the set of attributes of the thing and compare it to the set of premises in different arguments. The attributes (identified through sensory information) are compared to the premises of preexisting arguments (ie belief structure) (predictive model) to identify what the thing is. As I mentioned in Essay 6: Logic As Subjectivity though, the fact that our mind tries to find a balance between sensory data and our predictions means that in the pursuit of balance, sensory information can be manipulated to be in better alignment with our predictive model. This is not a process restricted to the identifying of objects though, in fact, it is far more prevalent when there is nothing as reliable as sensory information to cross-reference our belief structure to. Take drug addicts as an example. Hard drugs have the capacity to meet every psychological core need, and as I mentioned in Essay 1, this makes taking drugs a prime candidate for addictive behavior. Hard drugs can fulfill those psychological core needs to a degree that the rest of life just can’t attain, and thus the belief that hard drugs are good is one that gets deeply ingrained into your belief structure. Now you may call bullshit, people who take hard drugs often do so knowing it is bad but this merely serves to detail the highly evident discrepancy between intellectual belief and what we actually believe. How? Because little by little, everything that is not taking drugs becomes less and less important and happiness-inducing. Time with family gets robbed of its luster and the time spent not doing drugs gets increasingly spent on edge. When people try to confront you you get mad, an urge that only appears because an important belief is being challenged. This last point is the core takeaway of this essay in my mind.

Our beliefs have a defense mechanism in the form of urges. The more important a belief is, the more powerful the urge that comes up upon the challenge of its ability to be expressed as all beliefs seek expression. Like all behaviors, the ones we view as negative in nature are performed as a result of their capacity to meet our needs according to our beliefs so changing the behavior implies either adjusting the belief or suppressing its expression. In either case, we are depriving the need of an avenue of fulfillment. If we are performing the behavior despite the intellectual belief that we shouldn’t, that means the belief is important, and thus challenging it results in urges. When you get emotional during a fight with someone it is likely the result of exactly that. You may think you got emotional because the other person did something bad or because they frustrate you but no one has the capacity to make you feel anything. The reason you are emotional is likely because an important belief was just harassed. Maybe they insult you and challenge the beliefs your sense of significance relied on, or they are proposing an idea that could change your entire sense of certainty derived from your life plan, or honestly, maybe the fight is because you have a trait you are refusing to see because the belief of its validity is too important and it is causing your perception to alter to better suit your needs. The more important the belief, the greater it’s capacity to alter your perception of reality in the pursuit of balance, and the more intense and volatile the urges that come up when the belief is challenged are.

I’ve been speaking of this in a negative light up until now but the opposite is also true. When you read an amazing philosophical piece that you realize has changed your life there is an intensity of urges that come up but in a profoundly beautiful sense. An emotional scene that drives you to tears, a beautiful speech that inspires you, a conversation that permanently changes you, the act of getting married. The evocative sense of transcendent profundity these moments evoke is because they appeal to important beliefs, and are every last bit an indication of who you are and what you believe as the pain of those same beliefs being challenged. The realm of the emotional, be it the realm of interest and fascination, or pain and discomfort are the ways that we have to get in contact with who we truly are and what we truly believe underneath the mask of our intellectual beliefs, but that is a topic to be explored in depth another time.

That is all, see you all sometime by April 4 for Essay 11: The Derivative Model of Metaphysics!